21.3 enhancements

Review the BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT 21.3 enhancements for features that will benefit your organization and to understand changes that might impact your users.

Related topics

Known and corrected issues

Release notes and notices

BMC Helix ITSM enhancements Open link

21.3.06

Rebrand PWA screens in Smart IT

Rebrand embedded and custom Progressive Web Application (PWA) screens according to your company standards and requirements by using custom cascading style sheet (CSS) files and images.

To learn more, see Rebranding Smart IT on the Universal Client.

21.3.04

New and changed parameters in Centralized configuration

The following new parameter is added in the Centralized configuration. With this parameter, the administrator can configure the number of templates that are shown as recommended templates in Smart Recorder via Multi-Form Search.

smartRecorderMFSTemplateChunkSize

The following table shows the changed Centralized configuration parameter names and default values. These changes have been made to improve Smart IT search performance.

Parameter name changed to...	Default value changed to...
`com.bmc.bsm.myitsm.service.search.index. ISuggestedSearchWriterService.updateAll.PERIOD.1`	300000
`com.bmc.bsm.myitsm.service.search.index. ISuggestedSearchWriterService.updateAll.DELAY.1`	600000
`com.bmc.bsm.myitsm.service.search.index. ISuggestedSearchWriterService.indexAll.PERIOD.1`	-1
`com.bmc.bsm.myitsm.service.search.index. ISuggestedSearchWriterService.indexAll.DELAY.1`	No change

For more information about these parameters, see Centralized configuration.

21.3.02

(SaaS only) Enhance knowledge article management by integrating BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround

Boost your knowledge management experience by integrating BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround with Smart IT.

BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround provides the following benefits:

Extended language support and over 100 languages in auto-translation that reduces translation costs.
Preloaded knowledge articles that contain screenshots and videos.

Articles from BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management synchronized with BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround.

AI powered cognitive and natural language processing search capabilities that display the most relevant knowledge article to end users.
Ability to expose knowledge articles in a public portal to external users and to BMC Helix Digital Workplace and BMC Helix Virtual Agent users.
Support for KCS process and rich set of knowledge metrics and reports.
Ability to embed multimedia content into knowledge articles.

For more information, see Integrating BMC Helix Knowledge Management by ComAround with Smart IT.

Change in the landing page for Smart IT

In Smart IT version 21.3 and later, when you log into Smart IT, the landing page is Ticket Console. In versions earlier to 21.3, the landing page was Dashboard.

In Smart IT version 21.3 and later, Ticket Console does not show the ticket statistics by default. To view ticket statistics, click Show Ticket Statistics.

Availability of BMC Service Request Management

For new SaaS customers, starting with version 21.3.02 of BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Service Request Management is no longer available in new or fresh deployments of BMC Helix ITSM. We will continue to maintain the current BMC Service Request Management capabilities and to deliver minor updates to the solution, as needed for the existing customer base and those who migrate from OnPrem to SaaS, but no major design changes or major innovations are planned for BMC Service Request Management.

We recommend that SaaS customers use BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog to create and manage service request catalog items for your end users. Work Order management continues to be delivered with BMC Helix ITSM.

Review the availability of BMC Service Request Management in the following table:

Deployment type	Availability of BMC Service Request Management ¹
Deployment type	New or fresh deployment	Upgrade	Migration to SaaS
SaaS			-
On-premises

1 - By default, only the Request Entry, Work Order Console, New Work Order, and Search Work Order links are enabled after upgrading. If you enabled more links before the update, you must re-enable them after the upgrade.

21.3.01

Launch Microsoft Teams chat from a major incident

You can launch Microsoft Teams chat from the major incident screen. When launched, all the associated team members are invited to the chat. For more information, see Managing and tracking major incidents.

21.3

Manage and track major incidents

Track specific information about a major incident that is beyond the information that of a standard incident. Major incidents affect multiple customers and have a widespread impact on business and its goals. By using Major Incident Management in BMC Helix ITSM, you can manage and track major incidents, establish teams, collaborate with specialists and technicians, and update the major incident status within the same incident screen. For more information about the Major Incident Management process, see Managing major incidents.

Use BMC Helix Service Monitoring (Powered by AIOps) to analyse service health and probable cause of an incident

Within the incident screen, use the Probable Cause Analysis (PCA) health card to view the health of an impacted service and the top probable causal nodes that have caused the failure in the service. Use the Top Probable Causal nodes (PCA card) to view, create, or associate the CIs, tasks, or change requests. For more information about how to use the PCA card in Incident screen, see Probable cause analysis in Incident Management by using BMC Helix Service Monitoring.

BMC Helix ITSM: Smart Reporting is available only for upgrade scenarios for existing customers

BMC Helix ITSM: Smart Reporting version 21.3 is available only for upgrade scenarios for existing customers. This version is not available to new customers. For new customers, we recommend that you use the BMC Helix Dashboards reporting solution.

BMC Helix Dashboards is a SaaS service as a part of the BMC Helix Portal that offers unified reporting and gives you a consolidated view of data from applications across your environment. You can easily create, export, and share interactive dashboards with users within or outside your environment. You can also use template variables to reuse dashboard panels. For more information on the product offerings, see BMC Helix Dashboards Open link online documentation.

What else changed in this release

The following table lists the changes in the product behavior in version 21.3.07:

Update

Product behavior in versions earlier than 21.3.07

Product behavior in version 21.3.07

Searching for a person or CI in PWA

In the Create or Edit ticket screens, when you search for a person or CI, it fetches the search results that include any text you entered in the field.

In the Create or Edit ticket screens, when you search for a person or CI, it fetches the search results that begin with the text you entered in the field. This will improve the search performance.

The Auto Complete property is set to Leading Match for the following fields in different ticket types:

Customer – Incident, Work order and Change
Contact – Incident and Work order
CI – Problem investigation and Known error
Service – Change

When you search for a person or CI, begin with % to fetch similar search results as the Auto Complete property is set to Anywhere Match.

Relating multiple CIs in the change request.

You cannot use a comma-separated list of CIs as input to relate multiple CIs to the change request.

You can use a comma-separated list of CIs as input to relate multiple CIs to the change request.

The following table lists the changes in the product behavior in version 21.3.06:

Update	Product behavior in versions earlier than 21.3.06	Product behavior in version 21.3.06
Relating multiple CIs to a change request in PWA	You cannot relate multiple CIs in a change request by using commas to separate them.	You can relate multiple CIs in a change request by using commas to separate them.
Relating a change request to a ticket in PWA	In an existing ticket, you cannot create a related change request by using a change template.	In an existing ticket, you can create a related change request by using a change template.

The following table lists the changes in the product behavior in version 21.3.05:

Update

Product behavior in versions earlier than 21.3.05

Product behavior in version 21.3.05

New configuration parameter:

ActivityHotkeySearchesByPeopleAsset

In Activity Note, when you use search, the search runs against both asset and people records and takes a long time to fetch the search results.

This configuration parameter gives you the option to use the search in Activity Note of a Progressive Web application only on the people records that will improve the search performance.

For more information, see Centralized configuration.

The following table lists the changes in the product behavior in version 21.3:

Update	Product behavior in versions earlier than 21.3	Product behavior in version 21.3
New value in the Investigation Driver list	In the Investigation Driver list, the Recurring Incidents - Clustering option is not present.	When a user creates a problem in the Proactive problem management workspace in the ITSM Insights, the problem is launched in the PWA view in Smart IT, and in the Investigation Driver list, Recurring Incidents - Clustering is selected automatically.
Support for a separate Openfire database	Users could select a separate Openfire database or point to the Action Request System database.	A separate Openfire database is no longer supported. The application ignores the Openfire database input variable and uses the Action Request System database variable.
New configuration parameter: `innovation_suite.base.url`	This configuration parameter is not present.	This parameter is used to specify the server base BMC Helix Innovation Suite URL to be used for authentication and integration. For more information, see Centralized configuration.
New configuration parameter: `pca.numberOfDaysForViewRecentCR`	This configuration parameter is not present.	This parameter is used to specify the number of recent change requests to be displayed in PCA card of the incident screen. For more information, see Centralized configuration.
New configuration parameter: `IFrame-Allowed-Sites`	This configuration parameter is not present.	This parameter is used to define the base URLs for Smart IT and Mid Tier that are to be defined in BMC Helix Innovation Studio for iframe security. For more information, see Centralized configuration.